It's My Turn Saturday

Las Vegas, a Sunday in April, 11:04 p.m. Kat Hallam, a night-shift nursing aide, is turning the pillow of an old man who thinks she's a nun when her phone buzzes. A southern Utah number, wind, a whisper: “It's my turn Saturday.” The call drops. Four hours later comes a photo of a new dress, sage green, hanging from a nail. And three words: “Don't call back.”

Ten years ago, Kat was Keturah. She left Peniel, a fundamentalist community at the foot of the Vermilion Cliffs, the night before she was to be “given” to a sixty-year-old man. There, girls are given away by the Father, at fifteen, at sixteen, and they learn the man's name only the day before. Her little sister Selah was six when Kat left without waking her. She turned sixteen in February. Kat has six days.

A town with no addresses, white pickups circling at night, a father who says he has no daughter by that name, and one uniform for sixty miles: the deputy who got her out in 2016 and who, every April 22 since, has sent her the same question. “Still free?” Everyone tells Kat to go home. But someone in Peniel has found a phone, her number, and the one spot where there's a signal.

A thriller about two sisters, four words, and the exact price of an escape.

A work of pure fiction: the town of Peniel, the Assembly, its doctrine and its families are invented. Deals with a closed religious community, the forced marriage of a minor and violence, always off the page, with no sexual content.